UK Employers’ Liability

Many companies in the UK are facing historic Employers Liability (EL) claims often driven by asbestos claims. Due to age of these claims and the diversified nature of many companies they are unable to trace their historic EL policies.

Can you locate your historic insurance coverage?

Due to the age of these documents, companies all too often find they are unable to trace the coverage they need. Company mergers and broker changes compound this inability. The net result is files are moved and forgotten, and personnel with crucial institutional knowledge retire or relocate.

Insurance archaeology and legacy research service Marsh Risk Consulting Insurance archaeology and legacy research service Marsh Risk Consulting InSolutions, Marsh’s dedicated insurance archaeology practice, can assist companies in locating lost policies. Working in close collaboration with clients, our experienced archaeologists can locate historical insurance assets through comprehensive research in areas such as:

Research and internal reviews of historic corporate records and archives

Interviews with current and former personnel such as risk managers, finance directors, and corporate counsel

Site visits to review clients archives

Research and contact with former brokers and insurers

Identification and contact with various outside sources such as government entities, local records offices and accounting firms.

Getting started

Prior to any research project our archaeologists will contact or meet with you to thoroughly discuss the scope of the project, determine coverage gaps, obtain additional information on the history of any pertinent companies (including predecessors) and determine what research may have already been undertaken. After completing these initial steps, our archaeology team will provide a comprehensive proposal detailing specific research steps to find lost policies.

Case study 1

Our client, a publishing house, had acquired another publishing company and then received a number of legacy employers’ liability claims for printing works that it was not aware of via this acquisition.

InSolutions reviewed the claims papers and was able to:

Redirect a number of the claims as the printing works in question had previously been sold to a third party

Locate the (EL) insurance for the balance of the claims for the majority of the period in question

Due to our assistance, the client has been able to redirect these claims to third party owners or to the relevant legacy insurance carrier thus potentially saving hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Case study 2

Our client purchased a regional tyre and exhaust chain. The profit margin was around 11% per annum, claims ratios were low, and there is an acceptable level of staff turnover.

After the purchase, they received a number of legacy claims and InSolutions was asked to trace the insurance history.

We found:

Eight sites which had previously been owned by a tyre company, which in turn bought four of these businesses from garage owners, one from a timber merchant, and two others from a supplier of coal and central heating oil

For the sites the vendors had assumed the past liabilities of 14 companies ranging from an assortment of businesses, with the majority of the businesses being potential producers of asbestos related claims

Aside from having to trace 14 separate insurance histories for the client we suggested that they arrange underground surveys of all sites.

Of the 17 sites they owned, eight showed that underground oil storage tanks were still in situ, with three such tanks near a local river. The cost of removal of the tanks was estimated at £2 million.

Fortunately, through InSolutions the client now has EL coverage back to the 1960s and public liability cover for some of these companies.